Let's state upfront that a lot of what's in this post is conjecture based on a few pieces of information out there. I'm not convinced that it presents enough evidence of an actual connection. However, a bunch of folks have been talking about this (and submitting it here), so we wanted to raise the issue to see what people thought, and if there was any other information that could confirm or deny some of the conjectures in the piece. As far as we can tell, some of the timing is a bit odd, but it could very well be a coincidence. We'd love to have the full story if there was one, but federal prosecutors -- especially those under media scrutiny -- aren't known for suddenly opening up about these sorts of things. Given that, we thought we'd post some of the details of the discussion for the sake of continuing the discussion and seeing if anyone had anything more conclusive, either showing a connection between Aaron Swartz's prosecution and Wikileaks... or debunking it.

We've already discussed how Wikileaks bizarrely outed Aaron Swartz as a possible source, and that's leading to other speculation as well, including a question as to whether or not the grand jury investigation into Swartz was really more about the fishing expedition against Wikileaks, rather than the whole MIT/JSTOR effort. The Emptywheel blog (linked above) notes that Swartz's defense indicated it was aware of a much deeper investigation concerning Swartz that went beyond MIT and JSTOR to Twitter, Google, Amazon, the Internet Archive and possibly more -- and asked the government to turn over such materials:

These paragraphs request information relating to grand jury subpoenas. Paragraph 1 requested that the government provide “[a]ny and all grand jury subpoenas – and any and all information resulting from their service – seeking information from third parties including but not limited to Twitter. MIT, JSTOR, Internet Archive that would constitute a communication from or to Aaron Swartz or any computer associated with him.” Paragraph 4 requested “[a]ny and all SCA applications, orders or subpoenas to MIT, JSTOR, Twitter, Google, Amazon, Internet Archive or any other entity seeking information regarding Aaron Swartz, any account associated with Swartz, or any information regarding communications to and from Swartz and any and all information resulting from their service.” Paragraph 20 requested “[a]ny and all paper, documents, materials, information and data of any kind received by the Government as a result of the service of any grand jury subpoena on any person or entity relating to this investigation.”

Swartz requests this information because some grand jury subpoenas used in this case contained directives to the recipients which Swartz contends were in conflict with Rule 6(e)(2)(A), see United States v. Kramer, 864 F.2d 99, 101 (11th Cir. 1988), and others sought certification of the produced documents so that they could be offered into evidence under Fed. R. Evid. 803(6), 901. Swartz requires the requested materials to determine whether there is a further basis for moving to exclude evidence under the Fourth Amendment (even though the SCA has no independent suppression remedy).

[snip]

Moreover, defendant believes that the items would not have been subpoenaed by the experienced and respected senior prosecutor, nor would evidentiary certifications have been requested, were the subpoenaed items not material to either the prosecution or the defense. Defendant’s viewing of any undisclosed subpoenaed materials would not be burdensome, and disclosure of the subpoenas would not intrude upon the government’s work product privilege, as the subpoenas were served on third parties, thus waiving any confidentiality or privilege protections.

Given all of that, it's leading some to wonder if this was more about the big fishing expedition a grand jury has supposedly been working on for quite some time, trying to sniff out anything that can be used against Wikileaks. There is no confirmed connection to the Wikileaks investigation, but Emptywheel notes some oddities in the timing -- such as the grand jury investigation into Aaron seeming to ramp up just as it appeared that the big Wikileaks grand jury was coming up empty. In fact, as Emptywheel showed in a different post, it looked like the investigation into Swartz was going absolutely nowhere... until the grand jury suddenly showed renewed interest long after the arrest. The post notes that the Secret Service didn't even bother searching the laptop onto which Swartz had downloaded the JSTOR material for weeks after getting involved in his case.

But what happened in between the arrest and the sudden decision to really look into Swartz? The DOJ drew a big, fat blank against Wikileaks. The timeline:

• Swartz was arrested on January 6th, 2011.
• On February 9th it was reported that the Justice Department had drawn a blank on anything it could use to go after Wikileaks.
• That same day, February 9th, the Secret Service suddenly got around to issuing warrants to search Swartz's hardware

Oh, and one other key date. Just a couple weeks before all of this, on December 27th, 2010, Swartz had filed a FOIA seeking information concerning the treatment of Bradley Manning. As is noted in the posts linked here, it's not at all normal for the Secret Service to wait so long to get a subpoena.

I will say that I'm far from convinced there was a full connection here. There is way too much speculation and conjecture and it is quite possible (even probable) that the timing is all a coincidence. But the timing is at least worth noting, since it seems that more and more information keeps coming out about this.

Google's latest transparency report, once again, highlights why we need ECPA reform in the US as soon as possible. ECPA -- the Electronic Communications Privacy Act -- is an outdated law that was supposed to be about protecting user privacy, but was written nearly three decades ago and now does exactly the opposite. Beyond being complex in ridiculous and unnecessary ways, things that were true decades ago are no longer the case. For example, the idea that emails left for 180 days on a server no longer need a warrant because under ECPA they are considered "abandoned." Whereas in the real world, where all email lives on servers for quite some time, that idea makes no sense.

Either way, the report makes clear that US government agencies are well aware that they can go trolling through Google to get information on people with little oversight. Requests -- especially requests that are purely a subpoena (with no judicial oversight) appear to continue to rise: The largest part of that chart is the government subpoenas, meaning no judge had to look them over first:

68 percent of the requests Google received from government entities in the U.S. were through subpoenas. These are requests for user-identifying information, issued under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (“ECPA”), and are the easiest to get because they typically don't involve judges.

Unfortunately, Congress had a chance to reform ECPA last year, and the Senate Judiciary Committee even approved it. But, right at the end of the year, Congress passed a separate bill that had been attached to ECPA reform by itself... and left ECPA reform to rot.

Manned space exploration is a lofty goal that requires quite a bit of groundwork before people crawl into a metal cage strapped to a rocket. Only about a dozen countries have successfully launched objects into orbit, and the list of nations that can send people into space is much shorter (with the retirement of the space shuttles, the US arguably is not on the list anymore). But rocket technologies are only getting better and less expensive, and there are more and more plans (both governmental and commercial) for humans to explore space.

• Mars One is now looking for people willing to become astronauts, train for 8 years, and go on a ONE-WAY trip to Mars (and also be part of this globally-televised mission). The first team to go will be democratically elected from six teams of four astronauts, and the launch is scheduled for September 2022. [url]
• Iran is planning to launch a monkey into space sometime in February 2013. Iran has a goal of sending a human into space by 2020 and putting someone on the moon by 2025. (And Iran has already sent a rat, two turtles and a worm into space.) [url]
• MRI scans of astronauts who spent over a month in space show that long term exposure to microgravity can damage eyeballs and parts of the brain. The problems are similar to having intracranial hypertension -- where the brain experiences pressures that press it against the skull and eye sockets. [url]
• A simulated 520-day mission to Mars found that astronauts may need to keep Earth-like schedules or else they'll have trouble sleeping and possibly acquire some mood disorders. This ground-based study will affect plans for manned Mars missions, and it could also have implications for people who live with disrupted sleep and prolonged exposure to artificial lighting. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Dish Network's Hopper DVR has certainly made more than a few broadcasters uncomfortable. One of them, CBS, decided last week that it would rather drag its own brand through the mud (CNET) and lose a reporter than give its current lawsuit target a bit of favorable press. CNET named the Hopper "Best in Show" at CES, only to have CBS unceremoniously strip Dish's DVR of the title, a decision CBS likely now regrets.

The Consumerist reports that Dish is taking a well-deserved swing at CBS, this time on its own website where its touts the Hopper being named Best in Show, along with a very noticeable asterisk.

The wording after the asterisk reads:

*What’s an asterisk doing in our award? CBS will go to any lengths to keep you from enjoying ad-skipping technology – even censoring its own writers and throwing out their decision to name Hopper ‘Best In Show.’ Your vote is the only one that really matters.

Dish is also doing its part to keep print journalism alive, taking out full page ads in several newspapers.
 
So, what did CBS gain from freezing its legal foe out of an award? Absolutely nothing.

The broadcaster was reportedly worried that having one of its subsidiaries give an award to a Hopper DVR would possibly hurt its case in court. However, now that it’s been revealed that the device did indeed win the award — even if will never receive the actual accolade — it has only turned into a public relations boost to Dish and the Hopper.

If people weren't already aware of the product, they certainly are now. And for many of those, technology that time-shifts AND skips ads is right up their alley. In addition, more people are publicly aware of the legal battle, which seems to boil down to the networks' insistence that customers watch every ad. Bad news all around, and CBS needs look no further than the still-smoking gun in its hand to explain all the brand-new holes in its foot.

Back in December we talked about some of the many items in Prenda Law's bag of copyright trolling tricks, focused on getting courts to allow discovery on IP addresses at any cost. The end goal, of course, is merely to get contact info for the purpose of beginning the intimidation campaign to get people to pay up to avoid the "threat" of a lawsuit from Prenda. That post listed a whole series of "tricks" that Prenda used to set up this ridiculous house of cards to try to both avoid having to name people as defendants (whereby they might defend themselves against such discovery), while also filing a ton of lawsuits that implicate the same IPs around the country, doing a bit of jurisdiction shopping.

The latest trick is that after being called on this, Prenda is seeking to deny the efforts to fight back by some of those who are associated with the IP addresses connected to these lawsuits. How? By arguing not just that these IP addresses don't represent defendants in the case, but actually going so far as to argue that there are no defendants in the case because the case itself is filed against "John Doe." The fact that the people associated with the IP addresses in question are still being sought as possible "co-conspirators" is completely ignored, as Prenda claims that makes no difference.

The lawyers at Booth Sweet representing those associated with a few of the IP addresses have hit back, pointing out just how silly these legal claims are, but also noting that if there is no defendant in the case, then there is no case and the whole thing should be dismissed:

If Plaintiff is the only party in this action, then filing suit was premature. “[A]n actual controversy must exist not only at the time the complaint is filed, but through all stages of the litigation.” ... “With no defendant there is no case or controversy and thus no jurisdiction for this Court to act.” ... Plaintiff’s solitary version of litigation has no place in the federal courts. As Plaintiff conceded in the prior action, “courts only have subject matter jurisdiction over justiciable matters, which are matters in controversy between an actual plaintiff and an actual defendant.” ... The Court should order Plaintiff to show cause why its one-party suit should not be dismissed.

They also point out that courts have long rejected the ridiculous claim that as long as it's a "John Doe" being sued, the target is not a party to the lawsuit until being named. Obviously that would make it impossible to object to being named, because you'd have no standing to object... until you were already named. Such a scenario makes no sense, but it's one of the many crazy legal theories Prenda is now pushing.

As we've noted before, nearly every move by Prenda feels like a move by a cocky (and not very intelligent) lawyer who thinks he's outsmarted the system via a whole series of loopholes, while all the various moves really do is raise even more awareness of an impressive level of incompetence. I knew a kid like that back in college, who thought he'd figured out every angle, and had a loophole planned for everything. It was the sort of thing where you just shook your head and though that if he'd only applied half the effort he'd put into finding loopholes to actually doing the work in question, he might actually be really successful. But, instead, it's all about the loopholes that don't impress anyone.

While US Attorney Carmen Ortiz continues to stand by her actions in regards to the Aaron Swartz case (and other cases where she's being accused of being over-aggressive in prosecuting people), more and more criticism is coming to light, including from some influential voices who understand first hand the sorts of things that Ortiz has been engaged in. Former federal judge Nancy Gertner, who some may remember from being the judge in the Joel Tenenbaum trial, has spoken out about Ortiz's actions, suggesting that Ortiz took things too far.

“Just because you can charge someone with a crime, just because a technical crime has been committed, doesn’t mean you should,” Gertner said.

“At the time of the indictment, [Ortiz] said, ‘Stealing is stealing.’ I saw that all the time when I was on the bench,” she said. “This is a classic line. Stealing an apple if you’re hungry is different than Bernie Madoff. It is obviously different.”

She goes on to criticize Ortiz's continued public claims about how Swartz could get 35 years in jail based on the charges she presented. Gertner notes that, thanks to mandatory sentencing guidelines, judges have less power to push back against overzealous prosecutors like Ortiz, and, as a result, it gives those prosecutors much more power to bully people into agreements.

“And in the world of punishment, the prosecutor has enormous power and he has the enormous power to make you plead guilty and give up your rights,” Gertner said.

As she notes, since the prosecutor can choose what charges to file against you, and then just pile them all up until you agree to plead to something, the prosecutor often has way too much power:

“So the prosecutor determines the charges and the punishment,” Gertner explained. “Again, once they start the process, once the indictment is brought, the potential for enormous punishment is there and although a judge has some discretion in sentencing, often what the prosecutor wants is what the person gets.

“When that happens the prosecutor has enormous power and has to exercise that with some degree of fairness and judgment at that end,” she added.

On top of that, she points out that there were clearly alternative ways that Ortiz could have handled the Swartz case, either offering a deal that didn't involve prison time or even a diversion program with a suspended sentence (such that charges would be dropped if Swartz stayed out of trouble for a certain set period of time). Instead, she notes that Ortiz chose the hardline path that was designed to "wreck your life" even though it seems clear that merely drawing attention to the belief that his actions were criminal would have likely stopped further such actions.

Finally, Gertner points out that part of the problem is that US Prosecutors like Ortiz get rewarded for "high profile" takedowns, and thus all of the incentives she had were to turn the Swartz case into something a lot bigger than it really was:

“If the U.S. attorney is going to take credit for every successful prosecution, not matter what the issues were, the U.S. attorney then winds up as ‘Bostonian of the Year’ for these prosecutions, then you know high-profile prosecutions are valued in the office,” Gertner said. “Mr. Swartz was a high-profile prosecution. Whether they are right is another question.”

None of this, of course, is unique to the Swartz prosecution. We've pointed to similar things in the past, and it's unfortunately common today that US Attorneys use their position not to seek justice in the world, but as a political stepping stone to higher office. As such, "high profile" cases where they "put someone away" get them additional attention and acclaim. Being judicious and recognizing when prosecution doesn't make much sense... does not. The incentives are totally screwed up, and that can create calamitous results.

Let me kick this of by saying that I'm a big fan of The Verge, which has quickly become a top tech site for many. I don't always agree with what's written there (I don't always agree with what's written anywhere!), but it tends to regularly produce high quality work. The Verge is at its best with its long form pieces that combine well-written narrative with great design and layout. A recent example of this was with its excellent history of the American arcade. That story got passed around a bunch -- I know I had it sent to me at least half a dozen times. It's a wonderful story if you haven't read it.

It was then interesting to see The Verge's Editor-in-Chief, Joshua Topolsky, take to Twitter to demand that Huffington Post remove a snippet and link to that story.

Formal public request. @bbosker and @huffingtonpost, please remove the content you've scraped from us. huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/21/the… Seriously.

— Joshua Topolsky (@joshuatopolsky) January 23, 2013

You can see the Huffington Post version here. I'm having a very hard time figuring out what Topolsky is complaining about. The HuffPo piece quotes the first paragraph and the first paragraph only and then has a prominent link to the full story at The Verge. The original Verge article is 47 paragraphs long -- plus amazing graphics, design and video. So... I'm sort of at a loss as to how anyone might think that the HuffPo snippet and link takes away from the original. HuffPo's Bianca Bosker shot back something along those lines, noting that it was just a short snippet and drove traffic to The Verge:

@joshuatopolsky that was a story we linked out to on huffpost to drive traffic/readers to The Verge, which it looks like it did 1/2

— Bianca Bosker (@bbosker) January 23, 2013

In response Topolsky explained more that his problem with it was that it hurt The Verge's SEO (search engine optimization) on such stories.

What's most egregious about this @huffingtonpost scrape is its theft of our SEO on title and text. Google "death of the american arcade"

— Joshua Topolsky (@joshuatopolsky) January 23, 2013

But I'm at a complete loss as to how that's "egregious" on the part of the Huffington Post. It would appear that this is solely an issue with the way Google's ranking system works. I've long thought that this was a weakness of Google. We've had many sites that scrape our content in its entirety -- and, as we've noted countless times -- we're absolutely fine with that. But I am often surprised at how often we see other sources listed above ours in Google. But that's always struck us as a problem with Google (and with how Google views us), rather than anything worth pinning the blame on the sites that copied our content.

In the meantime, though, having discovered in the past just how much traffic a link from HuffPo can drive, we'd like to offer up Techdirt as a site that HuffPo can freely link to whenever they want. We won't complain to them. Though, if Google ranks them higher in search, we might complain to Google...

We've obviously been covering a lot about Aaron Swartz lately, but his case is really just one of many similar cases involving people in positions of authority who simply don't understand basic technology, but feel that something must be illegal because they try to overlay an analog view on a digital world. In the Swartz case, Carmen Ortiz famously used the incredibly misguided and misleading "stealing is stealing" concept. However, as Cory Doctorow has been fond of pointing out lately, we're entering a war on general purpose computing, and this is just one battle front.

Two other recent skirmishes show the same sorts of things happening in slightly different contexts. A few months ago, we wrote about the case of Andrew Auernheimer, the security researcher who's been convicted and likely to face a long period of time in jail for exposing a blatant security hole from AT&T that allowed him (and anyone else) to gather personal data on the owners of any iOS device. Remember, AT&T set up some stupid security, making all of this data public via its own API. Now about to be sentenced, Auernheimer was asked to write up a "statement of responsibility" for the court, and chose to do a blog post in which he calls out what a farce the whole situation is:

The facts: AT&T admitted, at trial, that they “published” this data. Their words. Public-facing, programmatic accesses of APIs happen upwards of a trillion times per day. Twitter broke 13 billion on their API ages ago. This is something that happens more than the entire population of Earth, daily. The government has no problem with this up until you transform the output into something offensive to important people. People with “disruptive” startups, this is your fair warning: They are coming for you next.

The other one of my prosecutors, Zach Intrater, said that a comment I made about Goatse Security, my information security working group, starting a certification process to declare systems “goatse tight” was evidence of my intent to personally profit. For those not in on the joke: Goatse is an Internet meme referencing a man holding open his anus very widely. The mind reels.

I can’t survive like this. I am happy to be hitting a prison cell soon. They ruined my business. The feds get approval of who I can work for or with: they rejected one company because the CEO had a social network profile with an occupation listed as “hacker.” They prohibit me from touching any computer that isn’t federally monitored. I do my best to slang Perl code on an Android device to comply with my bail conditions. It isn’t pretty.

Meanwhile, up in Canada, there's been a fair bit of talk about how Dawson College computer science student Ahmed Al-Khabaz was expelled for discovering a security hole in a system used across many Canadian colleges to store personal data of students. In his case, part of the problem was that, after alerting people to the hole, he went back a few days later to run a script to see if they had closed the hole. This caused the company that managed the system to accuse him of criminal activity:

“It was Edouard Taza, the president of Skytech. He said that this was the second time they had seen me in their logs, and what I was doing was a cyber attack. I apologized, repeatedly, and explained that I was one of the people who discovered the vulnerability earlier that week and was just testing to make sure it was fixed. He told me that I could go to jail for six to twelve months for what I had just done and if I didn’t agree to meet with him and sign a non-disclosure agreement he was going to call the RCMP and have me arrested. So I signed the agreement.”

Even with the signed agreement, Dawson expelled him. While Dawson stands by its decision, the company Skytech says that it's now offered to hire him part time.

Yes, in all three of these cases you can make a case that what the individual did went further than others would go. Some might call it discourteous. Swartz downloaded a lot more than the system intended, even though the network was open and the terms allowed for unlimited downloads. Auernheimer didn't just find the hole, but he scraped a bunch of data and sent some of it off to a reporter. Al-Khabaz didn't just find the security hole, but he also went back and probed the system again later. But, in the context of someone who lives in this kind of world and understands technology, all three represent completely natural behavior. If the technology allows it, why not probe the system and see what comes out? It's the natural curiosity of a young and insightful mind, looking to see what information is there. When it's made available, how do you not then seek to access it?

But there is a fundamental disconnect between an older, non-digital generation who doesn't get this. They think in terms of walls and locks, and clear delineations. The younger generation, the digital native, net savvy generation looks at all of this as information that is available and accessible. The limitation is merely what they can reach with their computer. But this isn't a bad thing -- this is how we discover new things and build and learn. Treating that as criminal behavior is insane and backwards. It's trying to apply an analog concept to a digital world, and then criminalizing exactly what the system allows and what we should be encouraging people to do -- to push the network, to explore, to learn and to access information.

This is a culture clash, of sorts, but it represents a real problem, when we're criminalizing the most curious and adept computer savvy folks out there.

We were a little skeptical of Kim Dotcom's new Mega cloud storage offering, in part because the claims of security and privacy seemed somewhat dubious upfront. We didn't see how it would be reasonably possible to do everything the service claimed it was doing in a manner that really kept the data secret. And, indeed, it has not taken long for security researchers around the globe to raise questions. Right away there were significant questions about the security design choices, including some questions about how random the random key generation really was, as well as significant concerns about Mega's claims that it offered deduplification (if things were really encrypted correctly, there would be nothing to deduplicate).

While Mega has responded to some of those criticisms, a whole host of other security questions have been raised, leading cryptographer Nadim Kobeissi to tell Forbes: "Quite frankly it felt like I had coded this in 2011 while drunk." A big part of the problem is that, by doing everything in the browser, you're really still trusting Mega, even as Mega implies that you have full control over the encryption.

And, then comes the news that when you first sign up, while Mega hashes your password, it sends you an email that includes the hash in plain text along with other data, such that one hacker has already released a tool to extract passwords from Mega's confirmation emails:

Steve "Sc00bz" Thomas, the researcher who uncovered the weakness, has released a program called MegaCracker that can extract passwords from the link contained in confirmation e-mails. Mega e-mails a link to all new users and requires that they click on it before they can use the cloud-based storage system, which boasts a long roster of encryption and security protections. Security professionals have long considered it taboo to send passwords in either plaintext or as cryptographic hashes in e-mails because of the ease attackers have in intercepting unencrypted messages sent over Internet.

Despite that admonishment, the link included in Mega confirmation e-mails contains not only a hash of the password, but it also includes other sensitive data, such as the encrypted master key used to decrypt the files stored in the account. MegaCracker works by isolating the AES-hashed password embedded in the link and attempting to guess the plaintext that was used to generate it.

Users still need to crack the hashed password, but that's a relatively easy brute force effort, especially for those who use weaker passwords (i.e., most people). There are, of course, much more secure ways of handling this, such as not including the plain text hash in the email.

All that said, many of these problems can be fixed, but when your whole pitch to the public is about how secure and private you are -- and some have been falsely implying that such a system allows individuals to avoid copyright infringement claims -- it seems reasonable to suggest that better security should be in place from the beginning.

We've written here before about Apple's autocratic control of its app store, which has resulted in many questionable removals. To date, Apple has blocked a dictionary (because it contained profanity), a Project Gutenberg scan of The Kama Sutra (ancient sexytime), any app that connects to Dropbox (because... Dropbox?), an educational game based on the current war in Syria (too topical?), a DUI checkpoint location app (political pressure), an app that allowed a mute 4-year-old girl to communicate with her parents (patents!), as well as many apps that were potentially competitive with its home-grown software.

Now, Apple has pulled apps related to the 500px photography network, citing the "easy" availability of nude photos.

Apple has pulled the apps from photography network 500px from its App Store because, after 16 months of use, their clearly marked nude photo galleries suddenly became intolerable.

In addition for 500px's own app, the third-party 500px app ISO500, whose parent company 500px acquired because of ISO500's excellent integration, has also received notice that its app will be removed from the App Store shortly - for the same reason.

500px was notified by Apple that its software update made it "too easy" to find nude images via the integrated search. Initially, Apple said the app wouldn't be pulled but reverted to an earlier version. An hour later, it apparently decided that potentially searchable nudes was too much of a threat to its walled ecosystem and yanked the apps entirely. This seems a little harsh, considering the precautions taken by the software.

Just as it has the whole time, the app defaults to a Safe Search mode that excludes nudity, and you have to log in on the desktop version to change that.

Apple has responded to the strange and sudden removal of 500px's software with the following statement:

The app was removed from the App Store for featuring pornographic images and material, a clear violation of our guidelines. We also received customer complaints about possible child pornography. We've asked the developer to put safeguards in place to prevent pornographic images and material in their app.

Child pornography accusations notwithstanding (back to that in a moment), Apple's stance on nudity (or "pornography," as it prefers to term it) in its "curated" apps is ridiculous. 500px took steps to prevent just anybody from picking up the app and loading up on explicit images. But whether or not 500px made access to explicit images easier ultimately makes no difference. If it's nudity Apple wants to be rid of, it's going to need to shut down a whole lot of software.

But here's the thing: Flipboard integrates completely with 500px as well. Everything you can do on 500px's app, you can do on Flipboard. Is Apple going to pull Flipboard as well? What about Tumblr, Instagram and all browsers - including Apple's own Safari? You can get to nude images with them pretty easily, too.

And the child pornography concerns? 500px claims it was never informed about any alleged child porn -- not by Apple and not by its users.

Tchebotarev has responded to us, saying that 500px was not told about the child pornography complaints and that Apple had not mentioned any issues around nudity until a phone call yesterday. "We've never ever, since the beginning of the company, received a single complaint about child pornography. If something like that ever happened, it would be reported right away to enforcement agencies."

Apple is prone to overreaction when apps are criticized or accused of possible moral/legal issues (see opening paragraph). Rather than contact 500px and have them investigate the offending account(s)/images, it simply dumped the app. On top of that, it didn't even bother to tell the involved parties about this accusation. Apparently, developers should just find articles involving their embattled software and hit F5 until Apple's official explanation is appended to the post.

Yes, child pornography is serious and should be dealt with expediently, but knocking apps out of the market without verified claims is ridiculous. As was pointed out, if a user wants to access child porn, he's got plenty of options, all contained within Apple's approved apps, including its own software. It's a shoot-first approach that does a lot of damage to its relationships with its developers -- but the collateral damage is apparently acceptable.

Apple's arbitrary decisions on apps like this and the ones listed above make it harder and harder to respect its position as a self-appointed moral guardian of all things i-related. Its lack of communication and questionable tactics seem to be the unfortunate byproduct of its position as the most desirable market.

Personally, I'm glad I have an Android. As an adult, I prefer to be given the options befitting an adult, rather than have my software choices limited by a corporation's belief that I shouldn't be trusted with anything "mature" on the off chance that a child might access it. The Android marketplace is full of questionable apps, malware and outright sleaze, but at least it assumes I can make my own decisions on what sort of content I want to view or interact with, rather than pre-screen everything like a helicopter parent rummaging through the Halloween "take," looking for anything with loose wrappers or heavily processed sugars.

Is it time to let the "how is a video game like a Catholic priest" jokes start flying? Show me on the cartridge where Mortal Kombat touched you? Remember that part in Grand Theft Auto IV when Niko Bellic shoved his hand down your/his pants? Now we know why all controllers have a vibrate function?

Inappropriate? Yes. Offensive? Of course. But no worse than Ralph Nader's bizarre statement suggesting video games molest children. Sure, the definition of "molest" could cover tinkering with their little minds, but Nader's mid-rant attack on video games suggests his mind is the one that needs some tinkering.

“We are in the peak of [violence in entertainment]. Television program violence? Unbelievable. Video game violence? Unprecedented,” Nader said. “I’m not saying he wants to censor this, I think he should sensitize people that they should protect their children family by family from these kinds of electronic child molesters.”

Well, that seems to be everyone's favorite topic these days when they're not decrying gun ownership in general. "Violent media." "Violent video games." Let's get on the grandstand, ride the bandwagon, and craft some unfortunate legislation! And by all means, let's hyperbolize the issue into irrelevance.

"Peak violence." That's a new one. Just a few years ago we were all concerned with "peak oil." Now it's culture-at-large, supposedly more violent than ever, but without the escalating crime statistics needed to bear out these claims. All it takes is a tragedy or two to obscure the decline in violent crime and fog up the memory of those who have made overwrought statements aimed at various forms of media before.

Here's Nader's post-Newtown editorial for Huffington Post:

Advertisements aimed at children are meant to tantalize and sell the latest toys, gadgets and video games -- many of which serve as electronic babysitters that feature violence and undermine parental authority.

That's a lot of blame to place on a few devices, Ralph.

The potential impact on the developing psyche of young children of heavy exposure to the violence and crass humor found in entertainment is disturbing.

"Potential." Keep using that word like it means something. Everything is "potential" until proven or disproven. So far, "disproven" is winning. And one man's (or child's) "crass humor" is another man's high art. To equate an exposure to crass humor to an exposure to violence is some spectacularly bad rhetoric. Carrying out this "potential impact" to its illogical extreme means that fart jokes breed as many killers as Eli Roth films do.

Here's Ralph Nader again, from 2011, in an open letter to NBA commissioner David Stern, asking him to reconsider playing games on Christmas because NO FAMILY EVER WATCHED A SPORTING EVENT TOGETHER.

I urge you to reconsider the Christmas day NBA overload in a spirit of decency, regard and recognition as to how this will disrupt family gatherings throughout the day with predictable arguments between children and parents about watching the games instead of spending quality time with siblings, parents, relatives and friends.

If anything, I'd think he'd be more concerned about the players being unable to spend time with their families on Christmas, rather than on the "predictable arguments" of one-TV households (or whatever it is he's alluding to). I appreciate Nader's "family first" stance on all of these fake issues, but seriously, it's like listening to someone rant that everything today is terrible because it's not 40 or 50 years ago.

Nader has done a lot of good in his role as consumer advocate, but he's taking a wrong turn down an avenue that leads past "irrelevance" and into "self parody." His slightly unhinged rant, which included referring to the inauguration ceremony as "political bullshit" (it kind of is) and calling out Obama for breaking several of his campaign promises (which he did), was made even more bizarre by his statement that all of this was "peripheral" to his real concern: the "molested" children.

If this sort of thing keeps up, by the time any conclusions are reached on violent media and its relationship to real-life violence, the American public (and perhaps even many of their representatives) will be so tired of hearing about it, they'll no longer care. If anyone's truly worried about "desensitizing" the American public, it should be those who feel the issue can only be taken seriously if it's surrounded by ridiculous conflation and tenuous correlation.

For years, the key rationale given by broadband providers for implementing data caps was that it was the only way they could deal with "congestion." Of course, for years, independent researchers showed that this was bogus, and there was no data crunch coming. If you actually caught a technologist from a broadband provider, rather than a business person or lobbyist, they'd quietly admit that there was no congestion problem, and that basic upgrades and network maintenance could easily deal with the growth in usage. But, of course, that took away the broadband providers' chief reason for crying about how they "need" data caps. The reality, of course, is that data caps are all about increasing revenue for broadband providers -- in a market that is already quite profitable. But if they can hide behind the claims that they need to do this to deal with congestion, they can justify it to regulators and (they hope) the public.

Of course, enough people have been calling this explanation out as completely bogus that it appears that even the broadband companies' own lobbyists may finally be dropping this line of reasoning. Former FCC boss Michael Powell, who is now the cable industry's chief lobbyist (president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association -- NCTA), has finally admitted caps aren't about congestion:

Michael Powell told a Minority Media and Telecommunications Association audience that cable's interest in usage-based pricing was not principally about network congestion, but instead about pricing fairness...Asked by MMTC president David Honig to weigh in on data caps, Powell said that while a lot of people had tried to label the cable industry's interest in the issue as about congestion management. "That's wrong," he said. "Our principal purpose is how to fairly monetize a high fixed cost."

Of course, as Broadband Reports notes, Powell is jumping from one myth (congestion) to another (fairness) that is just as ridiculous. If it was true, we'd see at least some prices going down. But we don't.

Except the argument that usaged pricing is about fairness has been just as repeatedly debunked. If usage caps were about "fairness," carriers would offer the nation's grandmothers a $5-$15 a month tier that accurately reflected her twice weekly, several megabyte browsing of the Weather Channel website. Instead, what we most often see are low caps and high overages layered on top of already high existing flat rate pricing, raising rates for all users. Does raising rates on a product that already sees 90% profit margins sound like "fairness" to you?

Data caps are about one thing only: increasing profits for the broadband providers, who already have massive control over the market with limited competition. It's nice to see them give up on one myth (even if we still see pundits repeating it without criticism), but it would be nice if we could get past the others as well.

One of the key points we've tried to raise over and over again in the wake of Aaron Swartz's death is that it's important for people to carry on his work. We've seen it in a few places already -- such as with academics freeing up their own work -- but there's much more to be done. That's why it's interesting to see plans around the globe for hackathons in Swartz's memory. Who knows what will come out of those hackathons, but seeing more people working on technical solutions for better sharing information and knowledge seems like it can only be a good thing.

Not content with giving the world the "three strikes" approach to copyright enforcement, France has recently shown signs of wanting to undermine one of the Internet's foundations: net neutrality. This has come about as a consequence of the French ISP Free's decision to block ads on its service. As Mike noted, this was essentially an attempt to persuade Google to pay the ISP an extra fee to carry its traffic, even though Free's customers already do that. That was resolved, at least for the moment, when France's Digital Economy minister Fleur Pellerin stepped in and persuaded Free to restore the ads.

Pellerin also called a meeting between interested parties to discuss net neutrality in France, since this is fundamentally what is at stake: if ISPs like Free can arbitrarily block or throttle elements of the IP stream, net neutrality is dead in France. However, rather than come to any final decision on this increasingly contentious area, Pellerin did what most politicians do in the circumstances: she announced that yet another group would be looking at the question and reporting back.

Given that in July 2012 Pellerin seemed to be a staunch defender of the idea -- she said "in my view, neutrality must be the rule" -- this conspicuous lack of support for net neutrality seems a clear sign that the French ISPs and telecoms have been lobbying hard and successfully. As the digital rights organization La Quadrature du Net put it:

Yet again, today's debate on Net Neutrality will have been a smokescreen. The voluntary speeches fall short with the referral of the issue to an obscure committee created by Nicolas Sarkozy, the CNN (Conseil national du numérique), all to finally justify the failure to adopt a serious position. Operators are left free by the State to restrict and monitor our online communications. While all the elements on the table demonstrate the need to act quickly by enshrining Net Neutrality into the French legislation, Fleur Pellerin still evades the issue.

Two days later, an opinion piece appeared in the French newspaper Libération, written by Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the Europe Commission with responsibility for the Digital Agenda, responding to these events. As Techdirt has reported before, she has some surprisingly advanced views on copyright, but her position on net neutrality is far less clear, as the English translation of her Libération article indicates:

On net neutrality, consumers need effective choice on the type of internet subscription they sign up to. That means real clarity, in non-technical language. About effective speeds in normal conditions, and about any restrictions imposed on traffic - and a realistic option to switch to a "full" service, without such restrictions, offered by their own provider or another.

So does that mean that "any restrictions imposed on traffic" are permitted, provided they are explained in non-technical language? Is Kroes signalling her own reluctance to defend this technical cornerstone of the Internet, just like Pellerin? At this stage it's still not clear. But what is evident is that net neutrality is under attack in Europe as never before, with France once more in the vanguard.

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